How flying saucers took America by storm

Flying saucers have, of course, represented mysterious visitors from Mars or even more distant places in countless movies, TV series, novels, comics, and even music albums.

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Illustration, Photo: Getty Images
Illustration, Photo: Getty Images
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

He only appears briefly in a trailer for a new horror film Ne, by Jordan Peele, but it's definitely there - a flying saucer.

Given the various twists and surprises we could see in Peele's earlier films Run! i Mi, it's impossible to tell whether it's a real flying saucer or not, whether it's coming from space or from Earth, but that brief, shiny silver scene is really appealing.

Maybe, but just maybe - we can check that now in cinemas too - Ne is a classic flying saucer movie - and a tribute to one of the most recognizable and mysterious forms in the history of popular culture.

"By the end of the 50s," says Andrew Sheil, professor of film at Newcastle University.

"That very shape has become shorthand for 'spacecraft piloted by a being from another world', now available to anyone involved in the visual arts".

Flying saucers have, of course, represented mysterious visitors from Mars or even more distant regions in countless movies, TV series, novels, comics, and even music albums.

From the "I want to believe" poster from Mulder's room in the TV series Dossier X to the popular children's picture book Aliens like to wear underpants.

The classic design flying saucer is the archetypal Unidentified Flying Object (UFO).

But despite everything, he did not, so to speak, fly until the 50s of the last century, when the world went completely crazy for flying saucers.

SF artists had been drawing circular craft long before that: in an early Flash Gordon comic from 1934, a spinning "squadron of deadly space gyroscopes" appears.

But if you flip through the pages of various science fiction magazines from that period such as Startling Stories or Super Science Stories, you will see that in the first half of the 20th century, aliens preferred to travel in craft that resembled submarines and airplanes.

Everything changed 75 years ago.

In June 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a commercial pilot, claimed to have seen "flying discs" that flew over Washington state at nearly 2000 miles per hour.

The editor of the Eastern Oregon newspaper sent this news, which was impossible to verify, to the Associated Press agency, and so on June 26 of that year Hearst International issued a statement in which the fateful term "flying saucer" appeared.

The story spread across the planet at a speed greater than that 2000 kilometers per hour.

Soon, hundreds of similar 'sightings' were reported, among them the one about the remains of that flying saucer that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico.

Some of the reports were obvious hoaxes: it wasn't hard at all to make a fake photo if you had a rattrap, Frisbee or pizza handy.

Some of the sightings, Shale says, turned out to be from "weather balloons, zeppelins, clouds, or experimental aircraft that were being developed by the Air Force as part of Cold War activities."

However, let's be open to all possibilities - maybe in some situations a Martian spacecraft was seen hovering over sparsely populated areas of the Earth for pure fun.

One thing was certain - the craze for flying saucers had just begun.

Donald Menzel's 1953 book Flying Saucers offered three explanations.

"First, flying saucers are unusual. We all strive for regularity. We naturally attribute mystery to the unusual.

"Secondly, we're all a bit nervous. We live in a world that has suddenly become hostile. We have released some forces that we are no longer able to control; many fear that we are heading for a war that will destroy us all.

"Third, people enjoy fear to a certain extent. As if they are part of some exciting piece of science fiction".

Getty Images

The nervousness mentioned by Menzel exists for several reasons.

One of them is the competition between America and the Soviet Union over which country will be the first superpower to put a satellite into orbit: the USSR won with Sputnik in 1957.

"Interest in flying saucers skyrocketed the moment it became clear that humanity was going to visit space," says Kathryn Coldiron, author of the monograph "Midnight Movies."

Among other things, that guide dealt with a notoriously bad flying saucer movie - Plan 9 from space.

"People's imaginations can go in different directions when there is a stimulus like there was in the space race.

"I think that a similar thing is happening now in relation to climate change - authors are now stimulated to present the end of our species through art and we, at least in fiction, are currently witnessing the creation of a critical mass on this issue".

Americans had other things to worry about - unemployment, inflation, the threat of a Soviet invasion and, especially, the possibility that their cities could be razed to the ground by an atomic bomb like the one that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

One way to divert attention was to focus on flying saucers, "a phenomenon that was mysterious and entertaining," award-winning science fiction author Jack Womack told BBC Culture, "but not necessarily threatening, as was the case with nuclear war." ".

Flying saucers in popular culture

Although the reports of sightings of flying saucers are in themselves worthy of attention, the fact of the existence of a large number of memoirs dedicated to this phenomenon is no less interesting.

Womack's collection of those memoirs is also the subject of his book "Flying Saucers Are Real", which includes excerpts from the most interesting ones: "All Those Sexy Saucer People", "Flying Saucers and the Holy Scriptures" and "A Flying Saucer Trip to Hell and back".

A typical example is George van Tassel's 1952 memoir I rode a flying saucer:

"He's honest enough to admit that he didn't actually ride a flying saucer," says Womack, "but the space brothers suggested he give his piece a more commercial title."

As comical as all these books were, there were thought-provoking theses in them - the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung dealt with this topic in the work "Flying saucers: the myth of modern times about objects seen in the sky", published in 1959.

By then, flying saucers were flying all over popular culture.

Comic books were, as expected, flooded with these craft. EC Comics Special Edition - Twisted science fantasy from 1954 boastfully announced:

"EC challenges US Air Force with this illustrated, true account of flying saucers".

The world of animation met Marvin Marsovac in 1948 through Chuck Jones and his cartoon Duško Dugouško.

He piloted a Buck Rogers-style rocket in that opening cartoon, but appeared in a flying saucer in the 1952 episode.

In 1951, Ella Fitzgerald recorded a jazz number written by Arthur Pitt and Elaine Wise under the name Two little men in a flying saucer, a satirical list of the repulsive habits of mankind compiled by the little green men of the song's title:

"During their mission, the politician was heard talking as they flew, but they quickly disappeared, faster than they thought, in a cloud of hot air."

In the meantime, this song was simplified and turned into a children's song to teach counting.

However, no medium has been as obsessed with flying saucers as film.

The first film dedicated to flying saucers was called, yes, Flying Saucer and was shown in 1950.

It was an independent, low-budget thriller written, directed and produced by Mikel Konrad, who advertised it as something that might have been based on a true story.

"What are they?" - was the tagline on the movie poster.

"Where do they come from? Have you seen a flying saucer?

The following year, 1951, Hollywood released two true classics.

He was the first The Day the Earth Stood Still Robert Wise in which the alien ambassador Klaatu (Michael Rennie) warns the human race to "lead a peaceful life or continue on our current course and face destruction."

His elegant saucer, without windows, was a great example of interplanetary minimalism.

Another classic from 1951 was Creature Howard Hawks in which people discover an alien ship in arctic ice.

In the original work, a short story by John Campbell, the spaceship is "like a submarine...90 meters long and 15 meters in diameter", but in the film it is a saucer, and its only surviving crew member is a monstrous predator.

"Each in their own way, these films underscore the dark social paranoia that gripped America," says Michael Stein in Alien Invasion! A History of Aliens in Popular Culture:

"One evoked the fear of a subversive invasion, while the other concerned the nightmare of global destruction."

Considering how flying saucers have been a stand-in for some other worldly horrors, it will be interesting to see what they represent in the film. Ne.

Until now, Peele's genius horror films have inspired a lot of social commentary, with an emphasis on racism against black Americans.

Will the movie Ne continue that trend?

"Peel's decision to make a movie about flying saucers is not surprising," says Mark Boldt, author of Rutledge's Guide to Science Fiction, "because there has always been a racial element to UFOs and alien abductions.

During the late XNUMXs, aliens were often described as distinctly white people.

African-Americans were the descendants of abductees, victims of technologically advanced pale-faced aliens who suddenly appeared from afar, and African-American science fiction and Afrofuturism very often addressed this brutal historical moment.

Ne is just another example of this connection".

The end of the flying saucer mania

If we go back again to the fifties, we notice that films about flying saucers did not always have deep socio-political interests.

They belong there Devil from Mars (1954) Island Earth (1955) Forbidden Planet (1956) Invasion of flying saucers (1957) and Atomic submarine (1959)

One of the biggest was Earth vs. Flying Saucers (1956) with typically spectacular frame-by-frame animation by Ray Harryhausen.

The one that wasn't so spectacular was Plan 9 from space (1957)

What all these movies had in common was the plate.

From a filmmaker's perspective, this iconic aircraft was a godsend, as it was relatively easy to build and film.

Unlike a traditional rocket, the saucer could change its direction of flight without any need to show its spin.

Also, he looked awesome.

"The best thing about the flying saucer design is its abstract simplicity," Bold told BBC Culture.

"Its perfect symmetry suggests that it does not represent a natural phenomenon, while the apparent absence of recognizable aircraft attributes - wings, engine - suggests that it is an extremely advanced technological artifact.

"All this places him in a place far ahead on the ladder of Western mythology of progress".

The plate itself was not entirely imaginary.

Its shiny and curved surface, behind which various, complicated schemes of wires and valves were hidden, depicted the most modern cars, ovens and washing machines of the post-war period.

"The flying saucer appears in the era of secretive new technologies, primarily military, including the atomic bomb."

Bold for the BBC adds to that, "a flood of new home technologies whose operation was a real mystery to the average householder."

The flying saucer seems to unite both tendencies that have appeared in the American sky".

All this did not last long.

As the fifty years drew to a close, the mania for flying saucers waned, not only in the number of reported sightings but also in their appearance on the big screen.

"When we talk about movies about flying saucers, horror movies did better than serious movies," says Mark Jankovic, author of the book "Rational Fears: American Horror Movies of the XNUMXs."

"Those horror movies weren't expensive either. Thus, sci-fi horror moved to the cheap, low-budget side of the market spectrum.

"The studios also realized that the big hits of the time weren't about an alien invasion, it was a Disney adaptation of 20.000 Leagues Under the Sea."

"Then came the period of science fiction films such as The Time Machine, Frankenstein and The Lost World (in which Klaatu himself - Michael Rennie starred).

"Victorian stylization of Gothic horror films gave these works an air of seriousness, while the flying saucers were lightly suppressed".

Meanwhile, in the real world, 1961 was the year Yuri Gagarin went into orbit, while President John F. Kennedy announced "man's landing on the moon and his safe return to Earth."

The actual space travel was so mind-blowing that flying saucers seemed old-fashioned by comparison.

Finally, in 1969, the US Air Force suspended Project Blue Book, an investigation into extraterrestrial sightings, by publishing the publication Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects.

The conclusion was devastating: "Science gained nothing from the UFO study that dealt with this phenomenon."

Of course, people continued to observe and report UFOs throughout the 60s and beyond.

It was in May of this year that a public, congressional hearing was held on the now-renamed Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP), although Scott Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence, points out that the military found "nothing of extraterrestrial origin."

It is also arguable that flying saucers have never left popular culture either.

Zoom in on an ordinary flying saucer and you instantly have the mothership from the movie Independence Day i District 9; turn it on its side and you get the appearance of the monolith in the movie Arrival.

U Star Wars, the Millennium Falcon is a flying saucer with spiked parts added to its front, au Star Trek spaceship USS Enterprise is actually a flying saucer with a body and legs stuck on the back.

But the sights of those old, original flying saucers in the sky or on canvas are becoming rarer.

"Like any fashion trend," says Vomak, "this phenomenon in its original form ended its life."

Today, flying saucers are a perfect example of Americana from the fifties, just like the checkered floors in restaurants of that time or the spoilers on the convertibles of the time.

When used in modern sci-fi blockbusters such as Men in Black or Mars invades Tim Burton, then it's because of their historical importance.

Maybe that's how Jordan Peele, himself sensitive to American historical injustices, uses them.

Flying saucers once seemed to have flown in from the terrifying future, but now they are just a remnant of the comfortable past.


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